Mythmaster Read online

  THE MYTH MASTER

  She was wandering aimlessly down the steps of the building, her eyes focused on distant lands, her pale hands folded in front of her like those of a polite schoolgirl who knows the teacher is looking.

  The man approached her. He released the trigger of his glowgas gun and left a harmless identifying mark on the girl’s forehead. It would disappear in time. And she might never know that she had been violated. His victims often did not realise that they were pregnant. These unknowing ones were lucky. Because they had not learned that they had a child to lose — and had lost it to the Mythmaster.

  He was a pirate of the lowest sort — he stole human lives. And the most powerful criminal in the starlanes wanted to own him — and the woman he hated.

  Copyright © 1973 by Leo P. Kelley

  First published 1973. by Dell Publishing Co., Inc, New York

  Coronet edition 1974

  The characters in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any living person.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which this is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain for Coronet Books, Hodder Fawcett Ltd., St. Paul’s House, Warwick Lane, London, EC4P 4AH by Cox & Wyman Ltd, London. Reading and Fakenham

  ISBN 0 340 18832 4

  CHAPTER ONE

  His name was John Shannon.

  On his face was a white-welted scar that slid from the corner of his right eye down the sloping path of his cheek to curve under his lower lip and give it an odd, angular lift. And when he walked, he limped, listing to the left a little, like a ship carrying unevenly distributed cargo.

  As he stood at the control panel of his ship, the orders he gave were familiar to his crew, and welcome.

  ‘Release the pellets,’ he said.

  At once the hundreds of spherical pellets began to drop down upon the North New England minimegalopolis far below the hovering ship. The pellets were black, an ominous rain.

  ‘Prepare to attack,’ he commanded. ‘Ready the pods for landing.’

  In other parts of the ship, crewmen touched buttons or flicked switches, obedient and efficient. The ship drifted down as if in search of the pellets that had just been released from it.

  Shannon studied the sensors on the control panel before him. A needle quivered behind a barrier of glass and began to ascend a curved numerality that told its own esoteric story. Shannon’s face was expressionless. When the needle reached 100, he spoke again into the ship’s communication system. ‘Rawley,’ he said to the biologist, ‘we’re going down. I want as many as possible this time. Maxevitch, you and Devlin will move fast. Last time, you acted like we were on some kind of picnic. Well, this is business. The Mythmadness down there now is at Point Prime. Board the pods. Move!’

  In the corridors of the ship, crewmen moved swiftly aboard the pods. Those who would remain behind to secure the ship during the bizarre battle about to begin below took up their stations.

  Four pods dropped out of the belly of the ship. As they descended into the rising mist of the hallucinogen that had contained in the dropped pellets, they extended their legs like languid insects aroused by spring.

  Shannon, in the first of the four pods, chose his landing place the rooftop of a huge apartment complex with the care and the practised eye of a man long familiar with such operations.

  ‘Starson,’ he said, addressing his young astrogator, who stood beside him. ‘Mark the pregnant ones with glowgas as usual, and let’s keep them together as much as possible. We don’t want to go searching all over hell’s half-acre for them like last time. It cuts down on our lead time and gives the Patrol time to zero in on us. You ready?’

  “I’m ready. Only…’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Maxevitch monitored an ultrafrequency message this morning. It was from Oxon Kaedler’s ship. He’s offering ia reward for information that will put him on our trail.’

  ‘Kaedler doesn’t concern me. Does he worry you?’

  ‘He’s determined to take over your smuggling operation. Not that he needs it. He’s richer than Croesus times ten. He’s also dangerous now that he’s dead legally dead, at least. The Patrol can’t arrest him, and the courts can’t prosecute him. Kaedler strikes me as a man worth worrying about.’

  ‘The door of my ship is always open. If Kaedler worries you, you can walk out as easily as you walked in. At any time. But now, man your station.’

  Starson turned a dial, and the legs of the pod touched the top of the building. The shock was brief and shallow, nothing more than a tremor. ‘We’re down, Shannon. Shall I tell them that the Mythmaster has come calling?’

  Shannon was feeling the thrill of absolute power that always surged through him at such moments. There was no need, he knew, for Starson to announce the presence of the Mythmaster. The people outside the ship in the contaminated area already had learned of it; of that he had no doubt. They were already performing their frenzied and unwilling welcome for the Mythmaster, who held them all temporarily in thrall and whose exploits would headline the next teledition of the Fastfax. The journalistic vultures who wrote heated copy for the insatiable Fastfax had long ago dubbed Shannon ‘Mythmaster’. The name appealed to them and to their starved readers, who were not interested in bland statistics concerning spacelane deaths on holidays or gutless reports of the latest miniwar in some distant part of Earth or on one of her planetary colonies. No, they wanted to read about murder, for example; and the bloodier, the better. They wanted to sate themselves on gore: CHILD TORN TO BITS BY WILD BEASTS ON MAYCLIFF MOOR! Later today, they’d be delighted to read about the latest attack of the infamous Mythmaster.

  Starson had the pod’s door down and was standing beside it. The mist of Mythmadness began to swirl into the interior of the pod. Shannon quickly swallowed an antidote capsule, as did the rest of the crewmen, before striding down the graded steps out into the inner surface of the door.

  He and Starson went down together through the building. They burst into apartments, where they found people singing or screaming or moaning, all of them lost in exotic worlds that the hallucinogenic pellets had released upon them from the darkness inside their own skulls.

  Starson moved swiftly past the people frantically crowding the corridors. He carried the tiny control box which would identify the particular women he was seeking. Its sensitive needle, he saw, now indicated the nearness of the right kind of woman.

  She was wandering aimlessly down the steps of the building, her eyes focused on distant lands, her pale hands folded in front of her like those of a polite schoolgirl who knows the teacher is looking. Starson approached her. He released the trigger of his glowgas gun, and a purple blast shot out from it and left a harmless identifying mark on the girl’s forehead. It would disappear in time. And she might never know that she had been violated, because, as was frequently the case, the Mythmaster’s victims did not realise that they were pregnant. These unknowing ones were lucky. Because they had not learned that they had a child to lose and had lost it to the Mythmaster. no message concerning their fruited state had yet reached their brain from the mysterious canals of their flesh.

  Starson unlocked the girl’s hands and dragged her along behind him as he bounded down the remaining steps. On the way, he marked an older woman who was cowering in a corner on the building’s lowest landing. He whistled a signal to Shannon. Shannon spotted the woman, came down and pulled her to her feet, and sent her careening down the steps, a planet of flesh about to be plundered.
/>
  Outside on the streets carnival!

  People milled about, all distraught jesters in a strange court where the King’s name was unknown and he ruled with the wildness of chaos. Automobiles had collided with one another. The body of a man from which life had fled in horror lay beneath the left-front wheel of a truck tilted against a leaning lamp-post. Five people three men and two women danced merrily down the streets in a circle, their hands linked and their heads thrown back in a delirium of delight that would pass when the effects of the hallucinogen had dissipated, leaving them alone and wondering what odd road they had been travelling, and with whom. And why.

  Lee Rawley came running down the street.

  ‘Yo!’ Starson yelled. He pointed to the two glowgassed women.

  Rawley’s hand and the hypodermic it held touched both the woman and the girl, and they crumpled at his feet, unconscious. He knelt first beside the girl. He cut away a portion of her clothes. He made the necessary incision. Staring through the microscopic lenses he had placed in contact with the pupils of his eyes, he located and extracted the fertilised egg that was not yet an embryo from the body of the helpless girl. He placed it in the container hanging from-his belt, where it rolled invisibly in a minus-forty-degree solution. He sprayed the wounds his scalpel had left on the girl’s abdomen. The flesh promptly fused. Not even a scar would remain to bear witness to his once-upon-a-dark-time predatory presence.

  While he performed the same smooth, swift operation on the older woman, the girl regained consciousness and rose to her feet slowly, a lovely flower opening to the summons of the summer sun. The glowgas insignia had already begun to fade from her forehead. Now it was a faintly bluish tinge resembling a cluster of tender veins beneath her skin.

  ‘Oh, come and dance with me!’ she cried, holding out her hands to Rawley, who was still kneeling over the other woman.

  Shannon appeared suddenly and shoved the girl, sending her sprawling. ‘Go!’

  She got up and went, shaking her head in bewilderment. It was clear from the expression on her young face that she did not like this man who had hurt her and whose own face was so hard and unconcerned.

  Rawley rose and followed Starson’s track, which was marked by a ragged line of glowgassed women. He functioned fast and well.

  Shannon checked on Maxevitch and Devlin. He discovered that they had located more than a score of women and had locked them all behind the iron fence of a tiny park set in the centre of a traffic circle. Shannon scanned the sky. The Patrol ships would be arriving soon, as soon as it was learned that communication with the area had been substantially reduced. Suspicion would give rise to prompt investigation.

  While he was watching the progress of his men and mentally calculating the rewards for all of them symbolised by the small bottles hanging from Rawley’s belt, the first of the Patrol ships appeared in the sky. They wove in and out of the rising mist of Mythmadness like frustrated fish in unpredictable ocean currents. No matter. They would not descend and submit to Mythmadness. Shannon laughed. Perhaps the day would come when the Patrol would discover the chemical constituency of his pellets, and then it would be only a of time until they would learn how to construct the antidote. But by then he would be in another business, hopefully one even more lucrative than stealing fertilised eggs from the helpless bodies of anaesthetised woman and later selling them to the highest bidder, unconcerned as to what use the buyer would ultimately put the human beings that would develop from those eggs.

  Shannon, watching the efficient and rapid progress of his crewmen at their tasks, sent his laughter soaring again into the sky that was quickly filling with Patrol ships.

  The men ranged out in orderly fashion. Starson located and identified each pregnant woman with a burst of glowgas. Devlin, and several other crewmen herded the women into caches of fleshly treasure. Rawley and his companions performed their brief operations. They were a team, a machine, a marvellously effective, almost robotised entity, each functioning as an individual with own particular task, and all co-operating skilfully to achieve their mutual goal.

  While the Patrol ships circled overhead, afraid to fire and risk wounding or killing the victims instead of the victimisers, the crew’s work progressed smoothly until each woman a half-mile radius of the apartment building that was their operational base had been either ignored because she was infertile or left bereft of the life she had begun nourish. A few pregnant women were allowed to remain pregnant, not out of kindness or consideration by the Mythmaster’s crewmen, but because investigation revealed that their embryos were too far developed for transportation in the unique way Shannon employed.

  Shannon gave the signal over his communicator that linked him to his far-ranging colleagues. When they had all returned, incongruously sober in the Mythmad milieu through which they moved, he raised his hand, shouted orders, and they boarded the four pods for the ascent to the mother ship.

  The only really dangerous part of the mission now faced them. They would have to break through the overhead net of Patrol ships. The force fields they activated to shield the pods would be their major protection, but the fields were not entirely failsafe. The Patrol had recently learned that a steady barrage of missiles directed at a single point on the field could partially penetrate, and, although not totally destroy the pod being attacked, could disable it sufficiently to make capture probable. The Patrol had learned that the missiles were effective almost by accident, a month ago, when one of their launchers had jammed and several bursts of missiles had hit in one spot and downed one of the pods. Shannon had lost two valuable crew members, a pod, and not a little of his towering pride during the mêlée.

  Now, as the pods lifted from the building where they had been moored, Shannon gave instructions to his men on each pod. They were to take a circuitous route through the skies and the skein of Patrol ships. Pod One — Shannon’s — would emerge first from the cover of the Mythmist and function as a decoy. When most of the Patrollers were in pursuit of Pod One, the other three could make it safely back to the ship. Shannon would then make a run for it. He asked for confirmation from each of the pods and got it.

  He broke through into bright sunlight and veered sharply to the left, then up several hundred feet, down a few, and then off to the right. The Patrol ships sped like bees to the hive after him. The irregular path his pod took made a concentrated, focused missile attack impossible.

  ‘Where are they?’ Shannon yelled to Starson, referring to the other three pods.

  Starson studied the blips on the screen set into the pod’s control panel and reported, ‘They’re almost there. One’s made it!’ He fell silent, watching the screen intently. ‘So have the other two. We can head home now.’

  The hive suddenly deserted the homing bees. Soaring straight up, Shannon’s pod left his pursuers confused and off-course. As they fought to control the forward thrust of their own ships, the Patrollers found themselves nearly a mile away from their target. They banked, most of them, a few minutes later, and darted upward after Shannon.

  The time Shannon had gained by his abrupt manoeuvre was sufficient. His pod nosed its way into the underbelly of the mother-ship. The trap closed behind it.

  Like a perfectly timed watch, the mother-ship fired its rockets an instant after the pod had entered the bay area. In minutes, it was out of the atmosphere and free of Earth’s gravitational pull.

  Shannon ate that night, not alone in his cabin as was his usual custom, but in the crew’s mess. His words were curt, but they carried his message of gratitude and congratulations. The crew, to a man, merely accepted what they knew was their due.

  Later, he asked Starson how successful they had been.

  ‘We got one hundred and seventy-two this time,’ Starson replied. ‘Rawley is transplanting them now.’

  Shannon nodded, pleased. Now he had the full quota his contract called for, with a comfortable few to spare. He ordered the ship’s course set for the planet Ra and then went down to the cargo hold.
He patted the sweating Lee Rawley on the back, and together the two men stared in silence at their treasure. The mice were encapsulated in tiny glass-cubicles, tier after tier of them. And, encapsulated now within the wombs of the mice, were the stolen human eggs. They were safe and secure for the journey to Ra, where Bernie Lennett awaited their delivery. Upon arrival on Ra, the human eggs would be removed from the mice and transplanted into artificial wombs, which would carry the embryos to term. Long before that time, Shannon would have been paid and would have left.

  ‘Thanks Rawley,’ Shannon said. ‘It was a helluva good haul.’

  ‘One of the girls died,’ Rawley said. ‘Shock.’

  ‘But you got the egg?’

  ‘I did.’

  Shannon smiled. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  ‘Nothing surprises me, Shannon.’

  ‘We’re stopping at Seventh Heaven for a while on the way to Ra. Call it a bonus for the crew.’

  Rawley remained silent.

  Shannon left him and went to his cabin, where he lay down, his hands behind his head, his mind adrift in dreams of money and that money could buy. What had Rawley said? That a girl had died? But Rawley had got the egg in time. Good man, Rawley.

  Sleep came like a virgin to Shannon, wary and shot through with fears.

  As the darkness closed around him, he thought about Seventh Heaven and was almost happy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Seventh Heaven appeared first on the scanscreen of Shannon’s ship as nothing more than a globule of white light that flashed into being, turned pink and then red, to indicate diminishing distance between itself and the ship, and then disappeared altogether as the ship began its docking manoeuvres.

  Seventh Heaven, through the viewplates, looked like a cluster of glowing jewels carelessly strewn about in the spacelanes. Shannon, as he stared at it while the ship was on automatic, imagined it as nothing more than what it was. He was not dizzied by its multilevel construction, its glittering radiance, or the enticing sensory waves it beamed out to nearby ships. He knew it simply for what it was. He knew it for a place of anchorage where ships and just possibly souls — might find both lusty surcease and a temporary haven. He knew it for the bizarre bordello it was.